Pope Francis apologised to the faithful for not being able to greet them and shake their hands as Italy posted a record spike in coronavirus infections that is threatening to once again spiral out of control.

Instead of wading into the crowd to embrace the sick and kiss babies during his weekly general audience on Wednesday, Francis walked in through a back door directly onto the stage to begin his catechism lesson.

At 83 and with part of a lung removed when he was in his 20s due to illness, the pope would be at high-risk for Covid-19 complications.

And yet he has been reluctant to wear a face mask and appeared without one again on Wednesday, even though many of his entourage and all of the Swiss Guards were using them.

He told the crowd on Wednesday: “I would like to come down as usual and get close to you to greet you, but with new prescriptions, we would better keep our distances.”

Francis often seems out of breath and speaks in a whisper because of his lung condition, suggesting that wearing a mask might be particularly uncomfortable for him.

This week, four Swiss Guards tested positive for Covid-19 and were in isolation.

All told there have been 19 cases in the Vatican, and the tiny city state amended its mask mandate last week to conform to that of Italy to require them indoors and out.

Italy is seeing a sharp resurgence in Covid-19 cases, with the Lazio region around the Vatican among the worst-hit in this new wave of the pandemic, with more people in the hospital than any other region.

On Wednesday, the country as a whole recorded its single biggest single-day jump in infections since the start of the outbreak, adding another 7,332 cases.

Public health officials are warning that hospitals are starting to fill up and Italy’s contact-tracing system is starting to crumble under the weight of the new infections.

“No health system is able to do contact tracing for more than a few thousand infections,” said virologist Andrea Crisanti, who as a regional adviser was credited with helping to keep Veneto’s infections down during the peak of Italy’s outbreak with aggressive testing and tracing.

Speaking to RAI TG24 on Wednesday, Dr Crisanti said the spike threatened to create a “vicious circle” of too many infections to trace, allowing the virus to spread uncontrolled.

He suggested that a Christmastime lockdown would help stop the chain of transmission and give enough breathing room to “reset” the contact tracing system.

Read more: Terrorists look for different targets as Coronavirus cuts crowds, says MI5 chief

A French minister on Wednesday accused Italy’s anti-immigration interior minister, Matteo Salvini, of behaving “like Pontius Pilate”, the Roman official who washed his hands of the fate of Jesus Christ.

Relations between Paris and Rome have soured since Italy’s new government took office in June and immediately moved to close its ports to charity ships that pick up migrants in the sea off Libya, forcing other EU states to step in.

In the latest such incident, France, Portugal, Spain and Germany agreed on Tuesday to take in migrants from the rescue ship Aquarius, after Italy refused to let the vessel dock.

“Mr Salvini today, he’s like Pontius Pilate. It’s obscene,” Loiseau told RTL radio.

Hours earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron was quoted as telling reporters that Italy had “decided to no longer follow international law, in particular humanitarian maritime law”.

Salvini, who is head of the far-right League, accused Macron of hypocrisy on Wednesday, saying the French had turned back more than 50,000 migrants from the Italian border “in recent months”.

“We do not accept lessons on rights or humanity from Mr. Macron,” Salvini said in a statement.

Italy has taken in more than 650,000 migrants over the past five years. Under European Union regulations, asylum seekers are meant to stay in the first EU country they enter until their application has been processed — a process that can take years.

However, many migrants reaching Italy want to head immediately to wealthier northern countries, including France. The French have barred migrants from crossing their borders, saying EU rules have to be respected.

]]> 7959 https://www.faith-matters.org/steve-bannon-drafting-curriculum-for-right-wing-catholic-institute-in-italy/ Wed, 19 Sep 2018 00:05:59 +0000 https://www.faith-matters.org/?p=7952

Former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon is helping to craft the curriculum for a leadership course at a right-wing Roman Catholic institute in Italy, stepping up his efforts to influence conservative thinking in the church.

Benjamin Harnwell, director of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute based in a mountaintop monastery not far from Rome, told Reuters Bannon had been helping to build up the institute for about half of its eight-year life.

Cardinal Raymond Burke, a leading Vatican conservative who is president of the Institute’s board of advisers, said Bannon would be playing a leading role there.

Burke told Reuters he looked forward to working with Harnwell and Bannon “to promote a number of projects that should make a decisive contribution to the defence of what used to be called Christendom”.

Bannon’s increased engagement with the Institute demonstrates how his involvement in Europe extends beyond electoral politics to an effort to build a populist faction inside the Catholic Church.

Bannon told Reuters this week that after Nov. 6 Congressional elections in the United States, he will spend “80-90 percent” of his time in Europe building up his Brussels-based populist “Movement”.

Bannon, who has visited the Institute’s home at the 800-year-old Monastery of Trisulti and addressed the organisation by video link, is helping to draw up the coursework for a training programme for conservative Catholic political activists and leaders, Harnwell said.

Bannon is also raising funds for the institute in both Europe and the United States, he added. The institute has set “very high academic standards”, Harnwell said.

Harnwell, a former European Parliament staffer, also is advising Bannon on his campaign to build a populist Movement across Europe that will support far-right parties in next year’s European Parliament elections, he and Bannon said.

Bannon and the Vatican did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this story.

EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

Harnwell said he founded the institute while working as an aide to a British Conservative European Parliament member. At the time, one of the legislature’s committees was trying to block Rocco Buttiglione, a confidant of Pope John Paul II, from becoming European Commissioner for justice and security.

During a confirmation hearing, Buttiglione, who was nominated to the European Commission by then-Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, described homosexuality as a sin and said the principal role of women was to have children. Amid political uproar, Buttiglione withdrew from consideration for the Commission.

Harnwell said Buttiglione was a “founding patron” of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, whose mission he described as “defending the Judeo-Christian tradition” and promoting “human dignity based on the image of God”. Harnwell added: “If you don’t have a culture of religious principle, we no longer have a credible basis for life.”

Buttiglione, who described himself as a convinced pro-European, said there were some differences between him and Harnwell. “I am interested in a cultural dialogue with the so-called Populists but I am not one of them and, first and foremost, I am a Catholic and I stand by the pope,” he said in statement to Reuters.

Harnwell said the Institute was setting up two training programmes: a leadership course that Bannon is helping to design, which Harnwell described a an “academy for the Judeo-Christian West”, and the Cardinal Martino Academy, named after a former papal ambassador to the United Nations, which will promote pro-life Catholic social teachings.

RABBLE-ROUSING

Bannon, a rabble-rousing conservative media entrepreneur and activist popular with Trump’s base, was fired from the White House a year ago, but the former adviser remained a Trump ally.

Bannon returned to the right-wing Breitbart News website, which he had headed before running Trump’s presidential campaign. In January, Bannon quit as Breitbart’s executive chairman after angering Trump by harshly criticizing his eldest son.

Leaving Breitbart threatened Bannon’s dream of leading a new political movement that supports his “America First” agenda of tougher trade deals and immigration laws.

Harnwell said the Institute expects to present its first courses next year. The monastery is large enough to accommodate 250-300 students at a time.

Burke, the former Archbishop of St. Louis, has been a leading light at the Institute since 2013 and is an outspoken critic of some policies of Pope Francis.

Since Francis’ election in 2013, Burke has led the charge by conservatives who have sharply criticised the pope, saying he has left many faithful confused by pronouncements that the church should be more welcoming to homosexuals and divorced Catholics and not be obsessed by “culture war” issues such as abortion.

Burke is president of the Institute’s “advisory board”, Harnwell said. The cardinal has condemned Islam as a threat to the West, a position that strongly parallels one of the principal political campaign themes of both Bannon and Trump.

In 2014, Pope Francis removed Burke as chief of the Vatican’s Supreme Court, the Apostolic Signatura, and demoted him to become patron of the Order of Malta, a charitable organisation.

Bannon is in “communication” regularly with Burke, although Harnwell acknowledges that the three-times divorced Bannon “doesn’t pretend to be a model Catholic”. Harnwell said the institute itself “takes no view on the pope” or his policies.

Burke has met several times with Matteo Salvini, Italy’s far-right deputy prime minister, Harnwell said. Earlier this summer, Salvini ordered Italian ports to stop allowing landings of ships carrying refugees fleeing Middle East strife.

After meeting Bannon in Rome last weekend, Salvini announced that he was joining the populist Movement Bannon was setting up aimed at disrupting the European Union.

]]> 7952 https://www.faith-matters.org/sting-blasts-leaders-as-cowards-over-migration-crisis/ Sun, 24 Jun 2018 00:06:16 +0000 https://www.faith-matters.org/?p=7432

British singer and actor Sting called world leaders “half men and cowards” on Saturday for their inability to solve the refugee crisis.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has already played down expectations of a breakthrough at hastily-arranged talks among EU leaders on Sunday on the migration dispute dividing Europe and threatening her own government.

Austrian Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache said on Saturday he expects a chain reaction across the European Union if Germany closes its borders to refugees.

Migration policies in the U.S. have also been in the spotlight.

“Thank God for Greece because you have shown the way,” said Sting, whose real name is Gordon Sumner, at an Amnesty International event in Athens.

“You have shown how to treat refugees when other people are building walls. When children are being taken from their mothers and put in cages, you are acting with compassion and generosity and commonsense,” he said.

“Because our so-called leaders, a sad parade of half-men, cowards, have not got the solutions … Once again Greece has shown us how to be civilized.”

Nearly a million refugees passed through and got support from Greece in 2015, as the country was dealing with its own major financial crisis.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday abandoned a policy of separating migrant children from their parents on the U.S.-Mexico border, after images of youngsters in cages sparked outrage at home and abroad.

Sting told Reuters the family separation policy was “brutal” and “barbaric”.

The former frontman for The Police was in Athens for two concerts as part of world tour.

Italy’s new government plans to carry out a census of the Roma community with an eye to kicking out anyone staying in the country illegally, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said on Monday.

“Unfortunately we will have to keep the Italian Roma because we can’t expel them,” Salvini, who is head of the far-right League, told television station Telelombardia.

Salvini set off a storm in Europe last week when he refused to let a charity ship carrying more than 600 mainly African migrants dock in Italy.

Spain eventually took in the boat, with Salvini saying Italy would no longer automatically take in boat migrants, who have used Libya as a springboard in recent years to seek a richer, safer life in Europe.

Turning his attention to another group that has often been the target of League ire, Salvini said his ministry was looking at “the Roma question” and wanted to see “who, and how many” there were.

Tens of thousands of Roma, also known as “gypsies” and “nomads”, live across Italy, many in squalid shantytowns on the outskirts of major cities and on the fringes of society.

Salvini’s comments drew an immediate barrage of criticism, with the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) saying his call revived memories of “ethnic cleansing”.

In a subsequent statement, Salvini said the government had no intention of setting up a separate archive for the Roma or taking finger prints, but wanted to protect Roma children who were barred from going to local schools by their parents.

He added that he wanted to check how European Union funds aimed at helping marginalised communities were being spent.

Migrant Numbers Dying in Crossings Highlights Human Catastrophe

At least 700 migrants may have died at sea this past week in the busiest week of migrant crossings from Libya towards Italy this year, Medecins San Frontieres and the UN Refugee agency said on Sunday.

About 14,000 have been rescued since Monday amid calm seas, and there have been at least three confirmed instances of boats sinking. But the number of dead can only be estimated based on survivor testimony, which is still being collected.

“We will never know exact numbers,” Medecins San Frontieres said in a Tweet after estimating that 900 had died during the week. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said more than 700 had drowned.

Migrants interviewed on Saturday in the Sicilian port of Pozzallo told of a large fishing boat that overturned and sank on Thursday with many women and children on board.

Initial estimates were that 400 people died, but the UN Refugee agency said on Sunday there may have been about 670 passengers on board.

According to testimony collected by EU border agency Frontex, when the motorless fishing boat capsized, 25 swam to the boat that had been towing it, while 79-89 others were saved by rescuers and 15 bodies were recovered. This meant more than 550 died, the UNHCR said.

The migrants — fleeing wars, oppression and poverty — often do not know how to swim and do not have life jackets. They pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to make the crossing from Libya to Italy, by far the most dangerous border passage for migrants in the world.

This week’s arrivals included Eritreans, Sudanese, Nigerians and many other West Africans, humanitarian groups say. Despite the surge this week, as of Friday 40,660 arrivals had been counted, 2 percent fewer than the same period of last year, the Interior Ministry said.

Most of the boats this week appear to have left from Sabratha, Libya, where many said smugglers had beaten them and women said they had been raped, said MSF, which has three rescue boats in the area.

The migrants are piled onto flimsy rubber boats or old fishing vessels which can toss their occupants into the sea in a matter of seconds.

About 100 are thought to have either been trapped in the hull or to have drowned after tumbling into the sea on Wednesday.

On Friday, the Italian Navy ship Vega collected 45 bodies and rescued 135 from a “half submerged” rubber boat. It is not yet known exactly how many were on board, but the rubber boats normally carry about 300.

“Some were more shaken than others because they had lost their loved ones,” Raffaele Martino, commander of the Vega, told Reuters on Sunday in the southern port of Reggio Calabria, where the Vega docked with the survivors and corpses, including those of three infants.

“It’s time that Europe had the courage to offer safe alternatives that allow these people to come without putting their own lives or those of their children in danger,” Tommaso Fabri of MSF Italy said.